The New York Times > Science > God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap
January 4, 2005
God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap
hat do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative
thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, a Web
site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each
year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at
www.edge.org.
Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class
E-Learning"
Irrational choices.
I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes
to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving
rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major
decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue,
what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the
complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their
unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"
I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all
creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or
indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design
comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design
cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
Judith Rich Harris
Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption"
I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection
processes were involved in human evolution.
The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness,
and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.
The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult
beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were
parents. Parental selection, I call it.
Kenneth Ford
Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The
Quantum World"
I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.
I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I
believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had
better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there.
I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be
so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in
every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy
and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of
water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life,
once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of
temperature, acidity, pressure, light level and so on.
Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is
another matter.
Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self"
For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and
other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able
to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much
less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can
have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic
configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking
questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky
territory because the hardware is different.
Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than
ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional
feelings.
There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with
emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from
studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging
techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical
emotionalist.
Lynn Margulis
Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell
Evolution"
I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and
eventually proved to be true beyond doubt.
What?
That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly
from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals
including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird
song and drumbeats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our
eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to
sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all
primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals.
David Myers
Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition"
As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:
1. There is a God.
2. It's not me (and it's also not you).
Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs
(and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible.
We have dignity but not deity.
And that is why I further believe that we should
a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for
this one!),
b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and
c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.
This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings
of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science
writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own
minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the
test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the
worse.
Robert Sapolsky
Neuroscientist, Stanford University, author, "A Primate's Memoir"
Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable
belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever
the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ...
I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should
believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring
proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof
that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health
problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok.
But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to
their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem and, all things considered,
such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially
astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with
god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept
gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say,
untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia.
Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual
Intelligence"
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists.
Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the
universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler
contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and
people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a
species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose
essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our
interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do
not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a
computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this
is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or
toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this
world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification,
selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable
pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be
surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of
minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory
that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause,
conscious experience.
Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh"
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool
us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is
the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection,
and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and
self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and
others' lives.
Philip Zimbardo
Psychologist, emeritus professor, Stanford; author, "Shyness"
I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who
worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and
psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal
responsibility during these episodes of mayhem.
But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists
were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to
dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent
that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their
normal sense of personal accountability for their actions - at that time
and place.
The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set
of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely
featured in Golding's "Lord of the Flies." The same processes that I
witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that
remote place: deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink,
role-playing, rule control and more.
Philip W. Anderson
Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton
Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It
is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce
mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as
mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and
doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on
it.
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in
hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any
adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we
would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is
improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.
The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained
to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep
up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the
bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are
blocked.
Alison Gopnik
Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The
Scientist in the Crib"
I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually
more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal
life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for
a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better
than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think
about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their
knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn
three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces.
David Buss
Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire"
True love.
I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In
that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women
desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've
discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive
and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers,
sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of
the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief
in true love.
While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are
fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well
traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing
attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound
self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own
course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or
boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems
scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.
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